Swiss physicist K. Alex Müller, working at IBM with his former student J. Georg Bednorz, showed in 1986 that a mixture of barium, lanthanum, copper, and oxygen attained superconductivity (disappearance of electrical resistance at extremely low temperatures) at 35 K. While this is almost unimaginably cold, it was substantially higher than temperatures at which superconductivity had been previously observed in any other materials. The article announcing their discovery was published in September 1986, and thirteen months later Müller and Bednorz were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.